All Tomorrow's Parties

  Look before you leap. Consider consequences. Think about it.

  He thought about it. Someone had taken advantage of his brief but unwilling sojourn in Selwyn Tong's VR corridor to convey the suggestion that he should pick up his credit chip from this particular ATM, and then check GlobEx. This could most easily have been Tong himself, speaking as it were through a back channel, or it might have been someone, anyone, else, hacking into what Rydell supposed was scarcely a world-class secure site. The look of the change that had been wrought for Rydell's benefit, though, had had hacker written all over it. In Rydell's experience, hackers just couldn't resist showing off, and they tended to get all arty. And, he knew, they could get your ass in trouble and usually did.

  He looked at the GlobEx bulge there.

  Went for it.

  It took him less time than it had to get the credit chip, to show his license and get the hatch open. It was a bigger package than he'd expected, and it was heavy for its size. Really heavy. Expensive-looking foam-core stuff, very precisely sealed with gray plastic tape, and covered with animated GlobEx Maximum Express holograms, customs stickers. He studied the waybill. It had come from Tokyo, looked like, but the billing was to Paragon-Asia Dataflow, which was on Lygon Street, Melbourne, Australia. Rydell didn't know anybody in Australia, but he did know that it was supposed to be impossible, and definitely was illegal, to ship anything internationally to one of these GlobEx pickups. They needed an address, private or business. These pickup points were only for domestic deliveries.

  Damn. Thing was heavy. He got it under his arm, maybe two feet long and six inches on a side, and went back to get his bag.

  Which he saw now was open, on the little counter there, and the guard with the pale eyebrows was holding Rydell's pink Lucky Dragon fanny pack.

  “What are you doing with my bag?”

  The guard looked up. “This is Lucky Dragon property.”

  “You aren't supposed to open people's bags,” Rydell said, “says so on the notebook.”

  “I have to treat this as theft. You have Lucky Dragon property here.”

  Rydell remembered that he'd put the ceramic switchblade in the fanny pack, because he hadn't been able to think what else to do with it. He tried to remember whether or not that was illegal up here. It was in SoCal, he knew, but not in Oregon.

  “That's my property,” Rydell said, “and you're going to give it to me right now.”

  “Sorry,” the man said deliberately.

  “Hey, Rydell,” said a familiar voice, as the door was opened so forcefully that Rydell distinctly heard something snap in the closing mechanism. “Son of a bitch, how they hangin?”

  Rydell was instantly engulfed in a fog of vodka and errant testosterone. He turned and saw Creedmore grinning fiercely, quite visibly free of the human condition. Behind him loomed a larger man, pale and fleshy, his dark eyes set close together.

  “You're drunk,” snapped the security guard. “Get out.”

  “Drunk?” Creedmore winced grotesquely, miming some crippling emotional pain. “Says I'm drunk…” Creedmore turned to the man behind him. “Randy, this motherfucker says I'm drunk.”

  The corners of the large man's mouth, which was small and strangely delicate in such a heavy, stubbled face, turned instantly down, as if he were genuinely and very, very deeply saddened to learn that it was possible for one human being to treat another in so unkind a way. “So whump his faggot ass, then,” the large man suggested softly, as if the prospect held at least some wistful possibility, however distant, of cheer after great disappointment.

  “Drunk?” Creedmore was facing the security man again. He leaned across the counter, his chin level with the top of Rydell's bag. “What kinda shit you tryin' to lay off on my buddy here?”

  Creedmore was radiating an amphetamine-reptile menace now, his anger gone right off the mammalian scale. Rydell saw a little muscle pulsing in Creedmore's cheek, steady and involuntary as some tiny extra heart. Seeing that Creedmore had the guard's undivided attention, Rydell grabbed his bag with one hand, the pink fanny pack with the other.

  The guard tried to snatch them back. Which was definitely a mistake, as the attempt occupied both his hands.

  “Suck my dick!” Creedmore shrieked, striking with far more speed and force than Rydell would've credited him with, and sank his fist wrist-deep into the guard's stomach, just below the sternum. Taken by surprise, the guard doubled forward. Rydell, as Creedmore was winding back to slug the man in the face, managed to tangle Creedmore's wrist in the straps of the fanny pack, almost dropping the bulky parcel in the process.

  “Come on, Buell,” Rydell said, spinning Creedmore back out the door. Rydell knew someone would've hit a foot button by now.

  “Motherfucker says I'm drunk,” Creedmore protested.

  “Well, you are, Buell,” said the heavy man, ponderously, behind them.

  Creedmore giggled.

  “Let's get out of here,” Rydell said, starting for the bridge. As he walked, he was trying to stuff the fanny pack back into his duffel and trying not to lose his precarious underarm grip on the GlobEx package. A twisting gust of wind blew grit into his eyes, and, blinking down to clear them, he noticed for the first time that the waybill was addressed not to him but to “Colin Laney.”

  Colin space Laney. So why had they let Rydell pick it up?

  Then they were in the thick of the crowd, headed up the ramp of the lower level.

  “What is this shit?” Creedmore asked, peering up.

  “San Francisco-Oakland Bay,” Rydell said.

  “Shit,” Creedmore said, squinting at the crowd, “smells like a fuckin' baitbox. Bet you you could get you some weird-ass pussy, out here.”

  “I need a drink,” the heavy man with the delicate mouth said softly.

  “I think I do too,” said Rydell.

  22. VEXED

  FONTAINE has two wives.

  Not, he will tell you, a condition to aspire to.

  They live, these two wives, in uneasy truce, in a single establishment, nearer the Oakland side. Fontaine has for some time now been opting to sleep here, in his shop.

  The younger wife (at forty-eight, by some five years) is a Jamaican originally from Brixton, tall and light-skinned, whom Fontaine has come to regard as punishment for all his former sins.

  Her name is Clarisse. Incensed, she reverts to the dialect of her childhood: “You tek de prize, Fonten.”

  Fontaine has been taking the prize for some years now, and he is taking it again today, Clarisse standing angrily before him with a shopping bag full of what appear to be catatonic Japanese babies.

  These are in fact life-sized dolls, manufactured in the closing years of the previous century for the solace of distant grandparents, each one made to resemble photographs of an actual infant. Produced by a firm in Meguro called Another One, they are increasingly collectible, each example being to some degree unique.

  “I don't want them,” Fontaine allows.

  “Listen up,” Clarisse tells him, folding her dialect smoothly away, “there is no way you are not taking these. You are taking them, you are moving them, you are getting top dollar, and you are giving it to me. Because there is no way, otherwise, that I am staying where you left me, cheek by jowl with that mad bitch you married.”

  Who I was married to when you married me, thinks Fontaine, and no secret about it. The reference being to Tourmaline Fontaine, aka Wife One, whom Fontaine thinks of as being only adequately described by the epithet “mad bitch.”

  Tourmaline is an utter terror; only her vast girth and abiding torpor prevent her coming here.

  “Clarisse,” he protests, “if they were ‘mint in box’—”

  “These never mint in box, idiot! They always played with!”

  “Then you know the market better than I do, Clarisse. You sell'em.”

  “You want to talk child support?”

  Fontaine looks down at the Japanese dolls. “Man, those things ugly. Look dead,
you know?”

  “’Cause you gotta turn 'em on, fool.” Clarisse sets the bag on the floor and snatches up a naked baby boy. She stabs a long emerald-green fingernail into the back of the doll's neck. She is attempting to demonstrate the thing's other, uniquely individual feature, digitally recorded infant sounds, or possibly even first words, but what they hear instead is heavy, labored breathing, followed by a childish giggle and a ragged chorus of equally childish fuck-you's. Clarisse frowns. “Somebody been messing with it.”

  Fontaine sighs. “I'll do what I can. You leave 'em here. I'm not promising anything.”

  “You better believe I leave 'em here,” Clarisse says, tossing the baby headfirst into the bag.

  Fontaine glances into the rear of the shop, where the boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, barefoot, his head close-cropped, the notebook open on his lap, lost in concentration.

  “Who the hell's that?” Clarisse inquires, noticing the boy for the first time as she steps closer to the counter.

  Which somewhat stumps Fontaine. He tugs at one of his locks. “He likes watches,” he says.

  “Huh,” Clarisse says, “he likes watches. How come you don't have your own kids over here?” Her eyes narrow, deepening the wrinkles at their outer corners, which Fontaine desires suddenly to kiss. “How come you got some 'spanic fatboy likes watches instead?”

  “Clarisse—”

  “Clarisse my butt.” Her green eyes widen in furious emphasis, a green pale as drift glass, DNA-echo of some British soldier, Fontaine has often surmised, on some close Kingston night, these several generations distant. “You move these dolls or you be vexed, understand?”

  She spins smartly on her heel, not easily done in the black galoshes she wears, and marches from his shop, proud and erect, in a man's long tweed overcoat Fontaine recalls purchasing fifteen years earlier in Chicago.

  Fontaine sighs. Something weighs heavy on him now, evening coming on. “Legal, here, be married to two women,” Fontaine says to the empty, coffee-scented air. “Fucking crazy, but legal.” He shuffles over in his unlaced shoes and closes the front door, locks it behind her. “You still think I'm a bigamist or something, baby, but this is the State of Northern California.”

  He goes back and has another look at the boy, who seems to have discovered the Christie's auction.

  The boy looks up at him. “Platinum tonneau minute repeating wristwatch,” he says. “Patek Philippe, Geneve, number 187145.”

  “I don't think so,” Fontaine says. “Kind of out of our bracket.”

  “A gold hunter-cased quarter repeating watch—”

  “Forget it.”

  “—with concealed erotic automaton.”

  “Can't afford that either,” Fontaine says. “Look,” he says, “tell you what: that notebook's the slow way to look. I'll show you a fast way.”

  “Fast. Way.”

  Fontaine goes rummaging through the drawers of a paint-scabbed steel filing cabinet, until eventually he comes up with an old pair of military eyephones. The rubbery lip around the binocular video display is cracked and peeling. It takes another few minutes to find the correct battery pack and to determine that it is charged. The boy ignores him, lost in the Christie's catalog. Fontaine plugs the battery pack into the eyephones and returns. “Here. See? You put this on your head…”

  23. RUSSIAN HILL

  THE apartment is large and has nothing in it that is not of practical use.

  Consequently, the dark hardwood floors are bare and quite meticulously swept.

  Seated in an expensive, semi-intelligent Swedish workstation chair, he is sharpening the knife.

  This is a task (he thinks of it as a function) requiring emptiness.

  He sits facing a nineteenth-century reproduction of a seventeenth-century refectory table. Six inches in from its nearest edge, two triangular sockets have been laser-cut into the walnut at precise angles. Into these, he has inserted a pair of nine-inch-long rods of graphite-gray ceramic, triangular in cross section, forming an acute angle. These hones fit the deep, laser-cut recesses perfectly, allowing for no movement whatever.

  The knife lies before him on the table, its blade between the ceramic rods.

  When it is time, he takes it in his left hand and places the base of the blade against the left hone. He draws it down, a single, smooth, sure stroke, pulling it toward him as he does. He is listening for any indication of imperfection, although this would only be likely if he had struck bone, and it has been many years since the knife struck bone.

  Nothing.

  He exhales, inhales, places the blade against the right hone.

  The telephone rings.

  He exhales. Places the knife on the table again, its blade between the hones. “Yes?”

  The voice, emerging from several concealed speakers, is a voice he knows well, although it has been nearly a decade since he has shared physical space with the speaker. He knows that the words he hears come in from a tiny, grotesquely expensive piece of dedicated real estate somewhere in the planet's swarm of satellites. It is a direct transmission, and nothing to do with the amorphous cloud of ordinary human communication. “I saw what you did on the bridge last night,” the voice says.

  The man says nothing. He is wearing a shirt cut from very fine gray cotton flannel, its collar buttoned but tieless, French cuffs secured with plain round links of sandblasted platinum. He places his hands on his thighs and waits.

  “They think you're mad,” says the voice.

  “Who do you employ to tell you these things?”

  “Children,” the voice says. “Hard and bright. The best I can find.”

  “Why do you bother?”

  “I like to know.”

  “You like to know,” the man says, adjusting the crease along the top of his left trouser leg, “but why?”

  “Because you interest me.”

  “Do you fear me?” the man asks.

  “No,” the voice says, “I don't believe I do.”

  The man is silent.

  “Why did you kill them?” the voice asks.

  “They died,” the man says.

  “But why were you there?”

  “I wished to see the bridge.”

  “They think you went there knowing you'd attract someone, someone who'd attack you. Someone to kill.”

  “No,” says the man, a note of disappointment in his voice, “they died.”

  “But you were the agent.”

  The man shrugs. His lips purse. Then: “Things happen.”

  “Shit happens,’ we used to say. Is that it?”

  “I am unfamiliar with that expression,” the man says.

  “It's been a long time since I've asked for your help.”

  “That is the result of maturation, I would think,” the man says. “You are less inclined now to move counter to the momentum of things.”

  Now the voice falls silent. The silence lengthens. “You taught me that,” it says finally.

  When he is positive that the conversation has ended, the man picks up the knife and places the base of its blade against the top of the right hone.

  He draws it, smoothly, down and back.

  24. TWO LIGHTS ON BEHIND

  THEY found a dark place that felt as though it hung out beyond where the bridge's handrails would've been. Not a very deep space, but long, the bar along the bridge side and the opposite all mismatched windows, looking south, past the piers, to China Basin. The panes were filthy, patched into their mullions with yellowing translucent gobs of silicone.

  Creedmore in the meantime had become startlingly lucid, really positively cordial, introducing his companion, the fleshy man, as Randall James Branch Cabell Shoats, from Mobile, Alabama. Shoats was a session guitarist, Creedmore said, in Nashville and elsewhere.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Rydell. Shoats' grip was cool and dry and very soft but studded with concise, rock-hard calluses, so that his hand felt to Rydell like a kid glove set with rough garnets.


  “Any friend of Buell's,” Shoats said, with no apparent irony.

  Rydell looked at Creedmore and wondered what trough or plateau of brain chemistry the man was currently traversing and how long it would be until he decided to alter it.

  “I have to thank you for what you did back there, Buell,” Rydell said, because it was true. It was also true that Rydell wasn't sure you could say Creedmore had done it so much as been it, but the way things had worked out, it looked as though Creedmore and Shoats had happened along at exactly the right time, although Rydell's own Lucky Dragon experience suggested to him that it was far from over.

  “Sons of bitches,” Creedmore said, as if commenting generally on the texture of things.

  Rydell ordered a round of beer. “Listen, Buell,” Rydell said, “it's possible they'll come looking for us, 'cause of what happened.”

  “Why the fuck? We're here, them sons of bitches back there.”

  “Well, Buell,” Rydell said, pretending to himself he was having to explain this to a stubborn and willfully obtuse six-year-old, “I'd just picked up this package here, before we had us our little argument, and then you poked the security man in the gut. He won't be too happy about it, and chances are he'll recall that I was carrying this package. Big GlobEx logo here, see? So he can look in the GlobEx records and get video of me, voiceprint, whatever, and give it to the police.”

  “The police? Sumbitch wants to make trouble, we give it to ‘im, right?”

  “No,” said Rydell, “that won't help.”

  “Well, then,” said Creedmore, resting his hand on Rydell's shoulder, “we'll come see you till you're out.”

  “Well, no, Buell,” Rydell said, shrugging off the hand. “I don't think he'll bother much about the police. More he'll want to find out who we work for and if he could sue us and win.”

  “Sue you?”